Quotes from Dan Simmons

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love.

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives.

The Shrike Temple had used androids extensively, complying with the Church of the Shrike doctrine which proclaimed that androids were free from original sin, therefore spiritually superior to humankind and—incidentally—exempt from the Shrike's terrible and inevitable retribution.

We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt.

Goodsir rolled the corpse over while Fitzjames removed his jacket and beat out the flames rising from the dead man's face and hair. Harry Goodsir felt as if he were watching all this from a great distance. The professional part of his mind noticed with cool detachment that the furnace, as poorly banked as the low coal flames had been, had melted the man's eyes, burned away his nose and ears, and turned his face into the texture of an overbaked, bubbling raspberry flan.

I teach him how to pair such technique with masculine or feminine caesura, or the joys of alternating iambic foot with unstressed pyrrhic, or the self-indulgence of the frequent spondee. I

The human genome . . . the human soul . . . distrusts homogeneity, Raul. It – they – are always ready to take a chance, to risk change and diversity.

We've been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals

You stay with her. I'll follow it in.

God Almighty, I love life. Even this vile place, where the trees are shattered stubs and where nothing grows but craters, even the sights, scents, sounds, and stirrings of this place are preferable to the unchanging nothingness of the Great Darkness.

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven's Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.

Metal teeth click shut in a steel vagina, missing his glans by a moist millimeter.

We have made some progress, thought Gladstone, despite the inertia forced upon us by the Core. Despite the near-death of science. Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations.

Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator's and even author's failures!

Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity." "Empathy," Aenea said softly. Father Glaucus turned his blind eyes in her direction. "Precisely, my dear.

entreaties.

physiognomy

The problem with being passionately in love, I thought, is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

PAHA SAPA PULLS HIS HAND BACK SHARPLY BUT NOT BEFORE HE feels the rattlesnake-strike shock of the dying Wasicun's ghost leaping into his fingers and flowing up his arm and into his chest. The boy lurches back in horror as the ghost burns its way up through his veins and bones like so much surging venom.

relationship between creatures and their creators, the love between parent and children, artists and their art, all creators and their creations. The poem celebrated love and loyalty but teetered on the brink of nihilism with its constant thread of corruption through love of power, human ambition and intellectual hubris. Martin